Artists

Aly Helyer

Aly holds an MA Fine Art Painting, Chelsea College of Art & Design. She has participated in numerous exhibitions, the latest of which is The Perfect Nude, curated by Dan Coombs & Phillip Allen at Wimbledon Space, Wimbledon College of Art (Jan 2012). The show travels to Phoenix Gallery, Exeter in March. She was one of three winners of the Core Gallery Open 2010 which resulted in the exhibition Extra-Ordinary at Core Gallery in 2011, co-curated by Rosalind Davis and Jane Boyer.

The two works in This ‘Me’ of Mine were created in 2007, after a period of sustained absence from the studio.

“On my return I didn’t know what or how I was going to paint. My starting point to begin with was not to make work like before, I didn’t have any ‘ideas’ it was just a case of making it up as I went along. The focus was just on ‘doing’ getting something down on paper then leaving the studio.”

Edd Pearman

British artist Edd Pearman (b. 1976) graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2002 with an MA in Fine Art. He continues to live and work in London where he works as a visiting tutor to colleges across the United Kingdom. Pearman has had two solo exhibitions in London; ‘Social Studies’ at Catto Contemporary (2003) and ‘Nude & Bird Studies’ (2005), and has been included in a number of group exhibitions in the UK, New York, Berlin and Japan, including Bloomberg ‘New Contemporaries’ (2002) and the ‘New Artist Unit’ at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (2006). Pearman’s curatorial projects include two successful group shows: “Sea Change’ (2005) at the Mark Jason Gallery, which was featured by the BBC and ‘Manderley’ (2009) at the John Jones Project Space, which received a ‘Pick of the Week’ in the. Guardian

Pearman’s work has been published in The Guardian, The Independent and The Times and features in collections around the world including the V & A, the Chapman Brothers family archive and the Bazil Alkazzi Foundation.

Jane Boyer

Jane was born in California in 1963. She attended Ball State University and the San Francisco Art Institute as a fine art photography major. She left the Art Institute in 1986 and has since followed an independent course of study. In 1998, she changed her medium from photography to painting.

Her interest in late modern abstraction developed into a love of art history and philosophy which Jane reads enthusiastically and has become the foundation for her art practice. Her current research interests lie in philosophical questions of the self and context and the boundaries between modernist and postmodernist views of identity. She is engaged in defining postconceptual identity through her artwork, curation and writing. Jane is currently working on This ‘Me’ of Mine, an exhibition exploring issues of the self, defined by socialization, limitation and memory. It is her first solo curating project.

Darren Nixon

Darren was born in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1976. He graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2000 with honours and has participated in several group and solo exhibitions. His work is held in numerous private collections in the UK.

Darren paints despite (or perhaps because of) his conviction that it doesn’t make sense to paint. His recent paintings explore the limits of our attempts to communicate meaning to one another. By playing with each aspect of the painting process, he asks the viewer to examine their expectations of the painted image. Questioning the exchange between information received from the painting and the personal experience of the viewer, Darren translates the off-balance, what-was-the-question-? atmosphere in the painting to the viewing experience. He tries to give each of his ideas equal weight within his work, refusing to allow his paintings to become dominated by a particular theme or concern. Ultimately he wants to create paintings which are about everything.

Hayley Harrison

Hayley Harrison was born in Cambridgeshire in 1983 and graduated from Sheffield Hallam University with a BA HONS Fine Art degree in 2005. She has participated in several group shows since graduation and in 2011 she was short listed for the New lights Exhibition at the Mercer Gallery in Harrogate.

Hayley is “a lover of objects and stories, not necessarily in the historical sense but the bits that are not said. She is drawn to the enchantment of ‘place’, and the often cold reality of that enchantment.” Her studio practice is currently based in London.

Melanie Titmuss

Melanie Titmuss was born in Wiltshire, UK in 1975 and has been living in London since 1999 after graduating from Wimbledon College of Art with a first class BA(Hons) in Fine Art Sculpture. In 2004 she completed a postgraduate course at Cyprus College of Art specialising in drawing but has finally found her calling in the messy maddening medium of oil paint. She has a studio practice at Coldharbour London Studios.

In Melanie’s work ‘the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles, history, past and present,’ a set of anecdotes where meaning is levelled by celebrating the beautiful and grotesque, the worthy and trivial, the joys and horrors in equal measure. There is an understanding and acceptance, a testament to the magnitude of the human spirit, whatever form that takes.

Annabel Dover

Annabel Dover was born in Liverpool and educated in Newcastle and London. She is currently studying for a PHD at Wimbledon exploring a practice lead response to the cyanotype albums of Anna Atkins. A regular exhibitor in the Jerwood Drawing Prize, she has shown her work nationally and internationally, and her next solo will be hosted by English Heritage at Darwin’s House. The Imperial War Museum has recently acquired a set of her cyanotypes and the same work will be featured in Carol Mavor’s upcoming study, Blue Mythologies, published by Reaktion. She herself writes regularly for Garageland and is represented by Transition Gallery, London.

Throughout her practice she finds herself drawn to objects and the invisible stories that surround them. Through their subtle representation she explores their power as intercessionary agents that allow socially acceptable emotional expression. The work presents itself as a complex mixture of scientific observation and a girlish enthusiasm which is candidly revealed in her touring lecture Stardust Memories.

My childhood, whilst seemingly on the surface to be of a functioning middle class family, was spent with parents who indulged in drama and abuse, where the truth was impossible to decipher and where the objects that surrounded my sisters and I were often the only witnesses to ludicrous acts of fantasy and violence.

Kate Murdoch

Kate Murdoch’s work reflects a fascination with the passage of time and the contrast between the permanence of objects and the fragility of human existence. She is self-taught as a visual artist.

Her previous employment, both in social work and education, informs her practice as an artist, as it involved working creatively and effectively with people of varying ages, social and cultural backgrounds with different physical and emotional needs.

The nature of her work is often participatory and much of it is linked with memory; her past work experience helps deal with the powerful emotions that unlocked memories can provoke.

Kate’s practice is a process of selection, reshaping and placing the objects she works with in order to reinterpret them and give them a new significance. This often involves placing familiar objects in an unfamiliar environment.

David Minton

After secondary school, David studied at Ipswich School of Art on Roy Ascott’s foundation course. Based upon behavioural psychology and cybernetics, this was an exciting year, and from there to Chelsea School of Art, where he gained a 1st Class Hons Dip.A.D.

He worked for a year before studying at London University Institute of Education for the Art Teachers’ Certificate, subsequently teaching at Swanley School, Kent’s first Comprehensive. David remained there throughout his teaching career, for some years as Head of Art, and also finally as a Year Head. This included a break in 1986 to study at the Institute of Education for an MA. He says, “it was a lovely year spent largely in the old British Library Reading Room.”

After taking early retirement he resumed painting. David maintains that sense of urgency required of someone attempting to make up for ‘lost’ time. He has a studio/workshop in his garden.

Anthony Boswell

Anthony studied graphics at University in 1988, he spent a short while in advertising and attained adult education certification which he put into practice running his own drawing courses for three years.

In his early work, he studied Dada/Surrealist type collages and photography, but further work took him through both natural and urban landscape and studying the nude from life and abstraction. Throughout his career, drawing has been at the centre of his practice. Currently, Anthony is working with short film and small mixed media constructions of interiors which hark back to his study of surrealism. He is exploring a continued interest in Modernist ideas, developing them into contemporary practice.

David Riley

As a first career David worked in the telecommunications industry, where he became a senior systems engineer creating bespoke solutions to meet customer requirements. David taught telecommunications-related computing for fifteen years during a period when computer design and programming was an art and a very creative process.

In late 2005, David left the industry to spend time exploring his creativity in a more direct and personal way, as an artist. This exploration started via a foundation course and a BA (Hons) Drawing for Fine Art Practice from Swindon College, where a first class honours degree was awarded by the University of Bath. He is now following self-directed lines of enquiry. David’s current interests include: codifying language in pursuit of a personal visual aesthetic; and the perceptual boundary between what is considered static and what is considered kinetic. David is the inventor of the TRIARCLE, CIRCUARE and SQUANGLE visual cyphers (currently on exhibit in the virtual world at: http://circuare.codedimages.com).

Sandra Crisp

Sandra Crisp was born in Cheshire, UK and studied at Chester College of Art. She earned a BA (Hons) Graphic Design from Leeds Polytechnic graduating in 1989 and received her MA Fine art printmaking from Wimbledon School of Art in1993. She has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, and taught printmaking and digital media in various London colleges.

Her work uses appropriated visuals stored in a digital archive which are reworked and recycled over time. Through a process of continual cutting/pasting and layering/erasing connections evolve between the diverse elements of appropriated media images, downloaded Internet text and graphics and personal photos or drawings. This process and these images address the constant saturation of images and information in our culture.

“The speed of today’s rapid information/digital culture is slowed down and contemplated via my own memory-space and inner dialogue; a process that connects ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ self,’ Sandra says of her work.

Sarah Hervey

Sarah background in teaching art to special needs children, psychology and dance scenography has given her a unique view of how we communicate, especially through body language. She has a particular interest in vulnerability.

For Sarah, what is vulnerable is not weak, but she sees a strength and dignity when people allow vulnerability to remain visible. She sees faces and hands as the most expressive parts of the body. She also believes skin has a unique ability to communicate the power of touch and is important in defining self-image.

Her current work drawing and painting the nude, explores the body in space and each pose of the model refreshes her notions of how the body communicates its silent messages.

She earned her BSC (Hons) Psychology in 1983 from London University and, her MA in dance scenography in 2003 from the Laban in London.

Shireen Qureshi

Shireen’s work revolves around the practice of painting, with the human body its central theme. In her work, the human body hovers between figuration and abstraction. Her figures are layered painted ghosts which retain their visibility while simultaneously shuddering into their surroundings; a disjointed sense of movement between exterior and interior space. In 2010 she received her BA (Hons) art practice from Goldsmith’s College.

Cathy Lomax

Cathy Lomax is an artist, writer and curator. She runs Transition Gallery in east London and edits and publishes two art and culture magazines, Arty and Garageland.

Lomax completed her MA in Fine Art at Central St Martins in 2003 and immediately set up Transition Gallery.

Alongside Transition, Lomax is a practising artist. Her work often takes the form of groups of paintings, which may be combined with other elements to create fragmented narratives that chart a curious contemporary longing for something unobtainable. Her recent exhibitions include 2010 Jerwood Drawing Prize, HangART-7 in Saltzburg, Austria and The Count of Monte Cristo: Island of True Stories at The Phoenix Gallery, Exeter.